My Kitchen Rules: Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan take their seats at the table for the cooking show reboot, though they slammed the reality series in resurfaced comments
An old rivalry between competitive cooking shows MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules has resurfaced.
And that’s enough to embarrass current MKR judges Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan.
The pair rose to fame on Channel 10’s MasterChef in 2009. Both were crushing after MKR’s debut in 2010, reports TV Tonight.
Matt Preston (centre) and Gary Mehigan (left) have joined the MKR reboot as embarrassing old rivalries from their days as judges at MasterChef surfaced. Also pictured (R) is original MasterChef judge George Calombaris
“My Kitchen Rules is obviously a blatant rip-off,” Gary said when he critiqued the Channel Seven show on TV Week in 2011.
Gary, 55, went on to claim that MKR’s set looked too much like MasterChef and that even some of the sets the judges used were too close to be comfortable.
He admitted to calling MKR fan favorite Manu Feildel and telling him not to say ‘your time is up, get off your benches’ on his show because this is ours!
Matt Preston, now 60, compared production values between competing hit reality shows in 2010 and said MasterChef was better.
Matt and Gary rose to fame on MasterChef on Channel 10 in 2009. Both were crushing after MKR’s debut in 2010. Pictured: Manu Feildel and Matt Preston from MKR
However, the celebrity food critic has been more diplomatic than Gary on MKR, stating that he wanted the competing show to be “a success”.
“The real damage would have been, ‘Oh no, cooking is dead as a segment, let’s move on to the next thing,'” he said.
“But it proved that there is a genuine interest in cooking and how it is cooked.”
“My Kitchen Rules is quite obviously a blatant rip-off,” Gary said, slamming the Channel Seven show on TV Week 2011. Pictured: Manu and Nigella Lawson at the 2022 MKR restart
Original MasterChef judges Matt, Gary and George Calombaris left the series in 2019 after a reported salary dispute with Channel 10.
Later, Matt and Gary joined Channel Seven in a lucrative business reportedly worth $1 million a year.
But the pair parted ways with the network after their show Plate of Origin flopped.
Now both are back on Seven as judges for the network’s MKR reboot.